Landlord rejects $6,000 one-shot, demands legal fees from city

What happened

A column in The Real Deal, published October 22, 2026, relays the views of one longtime New York City landlord who blames two programs for weak rent collection: the state's Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) and the one-shot deals the city's Human Resources Administration (HRA) gives to tenants behind on rent. The landlord is not named. The column says city landlords almost universally blame government programs, agencies and a slow eviction process. Some also cite tenants' money problems and inflation.

On ERAP, the landlord said he warned legislators that tenants should have been required to pay 30 percent of the rent. ERAP checks came with a year-long rent freeze. He estimates that 60 percent of his tenants who got ERAP money were $5,000 behind again six months later. The column notes that tenants with a pending ERAP application could not be evicted, and that the program ran out of money and was shut down.

On one-shots, the landlord says he does get back rent paid, but loses money on legal fees, which HRA does not cover. He says his legal fees typically equal 15 to 20 percent of each one-shot. In one case, a tenant paying $658 a month stopped paying. After four or five years and nearly two dozen court appearances, the city paid about $33,000 to cover 50 months of rent. His legal bills were $5,000 to $6,000. That works out to about $550 a month in rent after fees. The tenant never resumed paying. Three months later he filed a new case. Six months after that, the city offered another one-shot of $6,000. He says he is refusing it, wants his legal fees, and will go to trial, though he expects the judge will not award them.

The column cites other figures. Rent Guidelines Board chair Chantella Mitchell said last spring that one-shot payments rose from $102 million in fiscal 2022 to more than $540 million in fiscal 2024, then to $556 million in fiscal 2025. Mitchell cited this as evidence tenants could not afford rent. The columnist argues the rise reflects tenants learning they could get one-shots by not paying. Gothamist reported that about three-quarters of one-shot applications were denied in the first three months of the Mamdani administration. The column says applicants often reapply until approved. The landlord says some of his tenants have received two, three and four one-shots. He also says that in the last two months he lost two tenants who each owed $100,000, with rents of $2,300 and $3,900.